On November 2, 1989, a support band nobody outside Olympia, Washington had heard of opened for Tad at a club in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. About sixty people showed up. The band was Nirvana, two years before Nevermind, and the room they played had a legal capacity of five hundred. That gap, […]
Released 21 September 1979, Wire's 154 was named after a gig tally, lost its producer mid-mix, hid a solo EP in the first 20,000 copies and ended the band at UK number 39.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
Fifty years after The Saints pressed 500 copies of (I'm) Stranded in Brisbane, the details show that almost everything later read as punk ideology was a practical workaround.
Most bands form to play. The Desperate Bicycles formed in March 1977 for the specific purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label, and they were not being coy about it. They owned an amplifier and a bass guitar. The Dalston studio supplied everything else. Three hours later they had two songs, […]
How Brixton’s Windmill, a flat-roofed council-estate pub, became the incubator of South London’s guitar scene, from black midi to Black Country, New Road.
A record-store manager with a documentary impulse When Roger Shepherd started Flying Nun Records in Christchurch in 1981, he was not trying to invent a genre. He managed a record shop, he liked the bands he saw play around Christchurch and Dunedin, and he wanted a way to document them before they disappeared. That modest, […]
From Verboden in May to Khatsahlano in July, the Vancouver festival calendar for rock and indie in 2026.
